Sony Corporation ('Sony') and Panasonic Corporation ('Panasonic') today announced that they have signed a basic agreement with the objective of jointly developing a next-generation standard for professional-use optical discs, with the objective of expanding their archive business for long-term digital data storage. Both companies aim to improve their development efficiency based on the technologies held by each respective company, and will target the development of an optical disc with recording capacity of at least 300 GB by the end of 2015. Going forward, Sony and Panasonic will continue to hold discussions regarding the specifications and other items relating to the development of this new standard.

Optical discs have excellent properties to protect them against the environment, such as dust-resistance and water-resistance, and can also withstand changes in temperature and humidity when stored. They also allow inter-generational compatibility between different formats, ensuring that data can continue to be read even as formats evolve. This makes them a robust medium for long-term storage of content. Both companies have previously developed products based on the Blu-ray format, leveraging the strengths of optical discs. However, both Sony and Panasonic recognized that optical discs will need to accommodate much larger volumes of storage in years to come given the expected future growth in the archive market, and responded by formulating this agreement.

Sony previously commercialized a file-based optical disc archive system in September, 2012. Based on optical disc technology that Sony cultivated for its XDCAM series of professional broadcasting products, this system houses twelve optical discs within a compact cartridge as a single, high-capacity storage solution. Each disc within the cartridge holds 25 GB capacity, offering a total range of storage capacities from 300 GB to 1.5 TB.

In July this year, Panasonic launched its 'LB-DM9 series' of optical disc storage devices. This series uses a dedicated magazine of just 20.8 mm thickness to house twelve 100 GB optical discs. A maximum of 90 magazines can be stored, providing a total storage capacity of 180 TB. In addition, Panasonic adopted a newly-developed changer system together with RAID technology to offer rapid data transfer performance of up to 216 MB/s, while also ensuring high reliability by protecting data from unforeseen faults.

In recent years, there has been an increasing need for archive capabilities, not only from video production industries, such as motion pictures and broadcasting, but also from cloud data centers that handle increasingly large volumes of data following the evolution in network services. Both Sony and Panasonic have a proven track record in developing Blu-ray Disc format technologies, and by actively promoting the adoption of a new standard for next-generation high-capacity optical discs, they intend to offer solutions that preserve valuable data for future generations.

Since this seems to be aimed at professional use, could this be a precursor to 4k sized movies? The industry seems to be moving in the direction of getting the 4k televisions up and running at consumer affordable prices. Maybe this might be in conjunction with that. Wonder what they might call it next. Oh, I know...4k discs

But in all seriousness, SSDs with their physical footprint and bigger sized storage becoming smaller and faster, I don't see the point of this for the regular joe. By the time these discs are "ready" to come out, we will already have SATA-Express rated SSDs...and you know what that means...

They should do it faster. Is already much more convenient to save large amount of data on external HDD which are getting cheaper and bigger by day. Also way faster than any disks out there.

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Indeed,.....

Sony 4K Ultra HD TV models make use of their proprietary Sony FMP-X1 4K Ultra HP Media Player. Which apparently comes with 10 preloaded movies. So Sony, the winner of the HD disc format wars (Blu-Ray) decided to ship 4K media on a HDD based server and not an optical disc format.

Beyond that Sony seems to be gearing up for what they call the "Unlimited 4K Network" which suggest 4K streaming not disc distribution. Think Apple iTunes and App store distribution via download only!!!

Also note that the Sony 4K media player apparently wont work with anything but a Sony 4K UHDTV. So any other manufacturers 4K UHDTV is out,...

So even Sony, a company previously entrenched in a stranglehold on HD optical disc formats and has proprietary rights / control over a large (and growing) stockpile of media,....doesn't seem even a little interested in a 4K optical media format,.....

I see zero point in optical media. I haven't used CD's or DVD's for years, haven't even considered BluRay despite being more accessibe now. With all the portable USB HDD's and thumbdrives, i see very little point in using the fragile and slow discs that you can only write once and in one session only.